The F.B.I. director Kash Patel may or may not be a personnel problem for the White House. But he does present a challenge for “Saturday Night Live,” where there are no cast members of Indian descent to impersonate him.
So this weekend, “S.N.L.” dug deep into its celebrity Rolodex to recruit Aziz Ansari, the “Parks and Recreation” alumnus, to play the embattled Patel in its opening sketch.
This weekend’s broadcast, which featured Olivia Rodrigo as its host and musical guest, began with a parody of a White House news conference, introduced by Ashley Padilla as the press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Speaking over the sounds of nearby construction —“ Hold the work on the ballroom, please!” she shouted — Padilla said she would soon be taking a maternity leave.
“That’s when you tell President Trump about your maternity, and he says, ‘Leave,’” she explained.
She went onto bring out an administration colleague she called “the man, the myth, the liability”: the defense secretary Pete Hegseth, played by Colin Jost.
Jost entered carrying an oversized glass of what he said was Scotch (“I said I’d have just one”) and passed it on to Padilla (“for the baby,” he said).
He then took questions from other “S.N.L.” cast members playing reporters, including Ben Marshall, who asked if he was aware that the “Pulp Fiction” dialogue he quoted at a recent Pentagon service was not actually in the Bible.
After an audible pause, Jost answered, “Yeah! But also I do believe that someday it will be. In ‘Bible 2: Electric Bible-aloo.’”
He added that he would not apologize just because “I wear my religion on my sleeve, he said. “Literally. I have a tattoo on my forearm of Jesus choking out Jimmy Kimmel.”
Jost, in turn, brought out someone who, he said, “wants to come say hello before he’s almost certainly fired” — that was Ansari, playing Patel in his first “S.N.L.” appearance since he hosted in 2017.
Following a wide-eyed stare into the camera, Ansari announced that “after the attempted assassination of President Trump, anoth-ah one,” he said, invoking the DJ Khaled catchphrase. “We conducted an investigation that could not have been more thorough. We dotted every T and bulged every eye.”
Though Patel’s F.B.I. has been criticized for its lack of results, Ansari said, “Well, what if I told you this agency is only six weeks away from pinpointing the exact location of Osama bin Laden?”
He said that he should be celebrated for the “historic nature” of his appointment. “I’m a trailblazer,” he said. “I’m the first Indian person to suck at their job.”
Ansari added, “Everyone says Indian people are smart, hard-working, incredibly intelligent. I’ve proved without a shadow of a doubt that we can be just as incapable and incompetent as the whites.” For extra emphasis, he exchanges a high-five with Jost.
When she wasn’t performing two of her newest songs on “S.N.L.,” this week’s host and musical guest Olivia Rodrigo was putting her pipes to work in several sketches that called for her to sing. In her opening monologue, she sang a parody of her hit single “drivers license,” about the bureaucratic difficulties of obtaining a REAL ID. She also appeared in a filmed music video about a woman who discovers she’s a specimen in an alien zoo; and in a live sketch where she, Marcello Hernández and other cast members exchanged musical accusations in a fight involving two suspicious members of a couple, each of whom believes the other is cheating.
And just for good measure, in her first performance this weekend, Rodrigo was introduced by Debbie Harry, the Blondie frontwoman and rock music icon, who last appeared on “S.N.L.” as a musical guest in her own right in 1987.
Weekend Update jokes of the week
Over at the Weekend Update desk, the co-anchors Jost and Michael Che continued to riff on the collapse of Spirit Airlines, the gunman at the White House press dinner and King Charles III’s royal visit to America.
Jost began:
We start tonight with some breaking news. Just a few hours ago, Spirit Airlines permanently shutdown midflight. The airline stranded thousands of passengers at airports with no employees manning any of the check-in desks. Spirit said they were proud they were still maintaining their normal level of service.
Che continued:
Cole Tomas Allen, the alleged Correspondents’ Dinner shooter, took this selfie in his hotel room shortly before his assassination attempt, which he captioned, “FELT CUTE. MIGHT DELETE PRESIDENT.”
This week, King Charles visited the U.S. and met Zohran Mamdani, and I’m surprised he didn’t take Mamdani back to England with him, because he is an Indian treasure.
Jost picked up the topic:
King Charles visited the U.S. to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence from Britain, and to seek the release of a British hostage being held by an American terrorist. [His screen showed a photo of Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.] King Charles also presented President Trump with the original bell from a British submarine and said, “Should you ever need to get ahold of us, just give us a ring.” Or Trump could just call the guy saved in his phone as “Andrew (Island).” [Jost’s screen showed an image of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew.]
Across the pond of the week
“S.N.L. UK,” the London-based spinoff of “S.N.L.,” continues to be a worthy companion to its American cousin in its very first season. This weekend’s “S.N.L. UK,” hosted by the “White Lotus” star Aimee Lou Wood, used its opening sketch to satirize the recent royal visit to the United States as King Charles III (Larry Dean) and Queen Camilla (Emma Sidi) reminisce on their flight home. (“I’m glad to be heading home,” Dean said in the sketch. “I just hate being in any country where my mummy’s not on the money.)
If that’s too highbrow for you, there was also this sketch that imagines the Nintendo characters Super Mario (George Fouracres) and Princess Peach (Wood) as a bickering New York couple somewhere between “The Honeymooners” and a Tennessee Williams drama. Talk about one-upping the competition.
